Friends of the Dusk (7 page)

As distinct from me, Merrily had thought. Cautious to the point of timidity.

‘Why are you smiling?’

Sophie observing her, over the half-glasses.

‘Was I? Sorry. Nerves, perhaps. I’ve only met two new bishops of Hereford, and one of them—’

‘Let’s not talk about Michael Hunter.’ Sophie frowned and then lightened. ‘It won’t be an ordeal, Merrily. He might seem a little overpowering at first, but that probably conceals his own insecurity. Most new bishops go through a short period of—’

‘How do you mean “overpowering”?’

‘Wrong word, perhaps. He’s… emphatic. He knows what he wants. A phase, probably. It’ll pass.’

‘It’s just that Huw Owen appeared to be… slightly uncertain about him.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me greatly,’ Sophie said. ‘He’s rather like Huw Owen in reverse – in that Huw was born in Wales and brought up in England, whereas Bishop Craig was born in England into a military family. His father having been an army officer in Brecon, so that was where he went to school: Christ College.’

Private school.

‘So, where Huw Owen has a Yorkshire accent,’ Sophie said, ‘Bishop Craig sounds rather Welsh.’

According to the
Hereford Times
, Craig Innes had been at Oxford, where he’d stayed on as an academic for a couple of years before becoming a curate in Banbury. Then he was a vicar somewhere in the Thames Valley, returning to Brecon as a junior canon at the Cathedral and then, for a short time, a rector and rural dean in the Usk Valley. A suggestion of fast-track?

‘What’s he like, really?’

You had to accept the possibility of split loyalties here. The deliverance side of Sophie’s work had expanded probably four
fold since Merrily had taken over from the granite-faced traditionalist, Canon Dobbs. Sophie had never complained and would even, if pushed, admit to finding it fascinating. But her principal role was still as the Bishop’s lay secretary.

‘What do you want me to say? He’s quite large, rather imposing…’

‘I know what he
looks
like.’

‘Ebullient. Tends to fill a room.’ Sophie walked across to the second window, overlooking Gwynne Street, where Dobbs had lived. ‘I’m not yet sure how he works. He’s still setting out his stall. I don’t know how much he delegates.’

Merrily leaned her chair back against the wall and drew on her e-cig. This wasn’t a hard room to fill. It always felt intimate but active, like a hayloft or a granary. It was her second home. Through the vapour, she noticed for the first time that it had been very subtly tidied. No visible personal items – scarves, gloves, library books, packets of mints. Even the florid calendar from Sophie’s sister in Tuscany had gone. Was the new Bishop some kind of minimalist?

‘Sense of humour?’ Merrily said.

‘Good-humoured, certainly.’

Not always the same thing.

‘And played rugby, of course,’ Sophie said. ‘But you knew that.’

Merrily put down the e-cig.

‘Sophie, do you happen to know what dealings he had with Huw? Both were in the Brecon diocese, but is there any obvious history between them?’

‘What has Huw said?’

‘Not much.’

‘Parish priests and bishops…’ Had Sophie’s eyes become guarded? ‘We both know that parish clergy and bishops… it’s a different career path, and they rarely see eye to—’

‘A parish isn’t usually a career path at all,’ Merrily said.

Bishops were admin. Bishops were chosen for their managerial
and social skills. Spirituality rarely came into it. Or that was how vicars tended to see it.

‘It’s inevitable,’ Sophie said carefully, ‘that all bishops will have encountered some animosity on their way to the top.’

You had to smile. The higher clergy could fight like rats in a sack.

‘But to answer your question,’ Sophie continued, ‘I imagine Bishop Craig first encountered Huw Owen the same way you did. He completed one of Huw’s deliverance courses.’

Merrily sat up slowly.

‘When?’

‘During his time in the Usk Valley, I assume.’ Sophie’s eyes flickered. ‘Huw didn’t mention that?’

‘No. No, he bloody didn’t.’

‘Interesting,’ Sophie said.

‘So – let me get this right – that means Innes was actually in the deliverance ministry? For how long?’

‘I don’t know how long. But you don’t do it unless you have some interest, do you?’

You didn’t just have
some interest
. It became part of you, altered your awareness of everything. And then, before you knew it, it had become your touchstone.

On one level, having a bishop with exorcism experience could be helpful. Might save a lot of explanation and justification. But a bishop sometimes could be
too
close to it. The rules decreed that anyone in purple could no longer do hands-on deliverance, but that didn’t stop a Bishop from adopting a director’s role.

‘Anyway, we have all that to find out.’ Sophie uncapped her fountain pen, made a small note on her pad, looked up. ‘And is Laurence back?’

‘Oh yes. I feel awful. We were supposed to have a small celebration dinner last night, at the Black Swan, but… something came up. As usual. So we ended up just having a sandwich. As usual.’

In the end, Jane had stayed with them in the Swan, but neither she nor Lol had asked, in this too-public place, about Raji Khan. And then they’d gone back to their separate houses, separate beds, with too much unsaid, a sense of too much in the air. Jane had come with her to Hereford this morning with the intention of pestering Neil Cooper, of the county archaeologist’s department, for some gap-year work. They’d had lunch at All Saints, another too-public place, again not much said. Why did she have the feeling that something had occurred during the foreshortened Pembrokeshire dig to take the edge off Jane’s enthusiasm for a future in archaeology?

Sophie said, ‘Do you never think about a holiday?’

‘Never been able to afford one. Not much of one anyway. And no time, really.’

‘I meant you and Laurence. You had a chance when Jane was away.’

‘Not much of one. With Lol away as well, much of the summer.’

‘If you don’t,’ Sophie said, ‘you might regret it. One day. Maybe sooner than you think.’

She blinked, as if slightly appalled at what she might have said.

Merrily heard the door opening at the bottom of the stairs.

Footsteps. Big footsteps.

10

Trashy world

T
HERE WAS NO
sign of a grave or excavation, just the Green.

Castle Green. All green, no castle. The norm in Herefordshire. If it hadn’t been for the widespread destruction during the Glyndwr warfare of the fifteenth century, you wouldn’t be able to stand anywhere in this county without seeing a stone tower. Today, the term
castle
usually referred to nothing more than a green mound in a field that you wouldn’t even notice unless, like Jane, you were obsessed with bulges in the landscape.

No bulges here. Just a park now, Castle Green, featureless under a grey foil sky.

‘That’s where it was,’ Tris said, pointing. ‘Where Neil’s standing. They had the tree sawn up and cleared away within a day.’

‘And the bones?’

‘Safely removed. Couple of days. Wasn’t a proper excavation, though it doesn’t mean there won’t be one in the future. For now, they’ve just filled it in and returfed.

‘So what’s Coops doing?’

‘Dreaming, I suppose,’ Tris said.

When she’d asked for Neil Cooper at his office, Tris had insisted on bringing her over here. She’d never seen Tris before; he’d introduced himself as Neil’s assistant, and he was very charming, lithe and fit and floppy-haired and, like, incredibly good-looking. Even if you could’ve found Castle Green with your eyes shut, how could you not let Tris take you?

Pack it in. Stop testing your responses, it’s not going to change anything.

‘Sadly, he probably won’t be able to offer you anything,’ Tris said. ‘Things are really, really tight. We’re just a planning footnote nowadays. Way things are going, there might not even be a county archaeologist’s department in a year or so. Everything else has gone to the private sector.’

‘Are you… permanent?’

‘Thought I might be. I understood the county archaeologist might not return when his leg was out of plaster, and if he took early retirement, Neil might get his job, leaving a vacancy.’

‘He’s coming back?’

‘So it seems.’

He sounded quite bitter, and she might have asked him more if Coops hadn’t seen them and come over.

‘Jane.’ He didn’t sound excited to see her. ‘You get days off?’

‘All over,’ Jane said. ‘The work ran out. The Pembrokeshire highways department were doing this road improvement scheme close to an Iron Age camp. One of those situations where the archaeologists get to go in first to see if there’s anything interesting. And if there is, the council still builds the road.’

‘It’s called Rescue Archaeology, Jane.’

‘I know. Anyway, we found signs of a couple of hut circles, but no strong reason to hold off the bulldozers. We had like twenty-eight days before the road-building guys moved in? And that was it. Nothing. Anticlimax. So I’m home.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Hoping I can get something local. I mean, sooner or later they’re going to have to check out the Ledwardine Henge – either it is or it isn’t.’

‘Sooner rather than later, Jane, only if the supermarket scheme goes through.’

‘I thought those bastards were going bust.’

‘If that happens, it might actually slow things up for you.’

‘What a trashy world,’ Jane said.

Coops didn’t seem like the same guy. Certainly not standing next to Tris. Not so long ago, he’d still seemed fairly young and cool; now he had that family-man look, his hair too cleanly cut, his jeans too functional.

Nothing lasted. Jane felt this unexpected tear-pressure. You went away and everything changed. It was like the space she’d made for herself over the years had closed up behind her and wouldn’t reopen for her now.

‘Well, then,’ Tris said. ‘See you around, Jane.’

As if he knew he wouldn’t. She watched him walk away, up the bank to where part of the moat remained as an extended duckpond below the Castle House Hotel.

‘Tris is temporary,’ Neil Cooper said.

‘Too good-looking to last?’

‘Nothing lasts. Although everything does. In some form.’

‘There’s philosophical.’

‘There’s experience. Sorry, Jane, don’t mean to be depressing.’

‘You found some bones, then.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Should he have kept quiet about it?’

‘Tris? No reason to.’ But his expression had darkened. ‘Anyway… you enjoyed it while it lasted.’

‘Well, I got to do bits. Under supervision, obviously.’

Second week in Pembrokeshire, she’d found this metal artefact and they’d let her excavate it herself. Took an hour of intimate trowelling to bring up what could have been part of a gold torque. If it hadn’t been the end of a towing chain from a tractor. She’d still kept it – gap-year souvenir.

Coops said, ‘And you’re still committed to becoming one of us?’

Jane was gazing across Castle Green, this grassy space bordered by the river and the benches where people sat in summer to eat sandwiches and check their phones, or just get pissed. In Pembs, she’d been reading this thick book by the archaeologist Francis
Pryor, who could walk into a modern landscape and tell you in minutes what used to be there, by the colour and texture of the soil, the positioning and content of hedges, field boundaries, ditches and field drains, the stones under your feet. A touch of the visionary about Francis Pryor, who had written that walking into a strange landscape was like meeting someone for the first time. Asking yourself if this was a place you could trust.

This place must’ve been seriously trusted to get the castle and the Cathedral. The castle was all gone, every stone of it, but if you half closed your eyes you could almost see cold, etheric walls. And underneath…

‘You
have
found some bones, right?’

‘Some old human remains were exposed, yes,’ Coops said. ‘When the tree came up.’

‘A tree had grown on top of an old grave?’

‘So it seems.’

‘So you put a quick trench in.’ Which she could see, over the temporary fencing, had now been filled in. ‘How old
were
they?’

‘Probably medieval. Look, Jane, I—’

‘Well preserved?’

‘Not bad.’

‘What do they suggest?’

‘Suggest someone was buried here.’

‘Just the one person?’

He had his phone out, body language for
bugger off, Jane.

‘No, like, grave goods or anything?’

Coops shook his head, finger-scrolling on the phone.

‘Jane, I need to get back.’

‘Got pictures of the bones on there, Coops?’

‘No, I haven’t. He palmed the phone. ‘I’ve a meeting that’s been brought forward, OK?’

‘Could it be someone important?’

‘What?’

‘The bones.’

‘Jane—’

‘Well, obviously not
that
important. Sorry. Just some monk, then.’

‘Look.’ He lowered his phone. ‘It’s not exactly unusual for bones to be found here. It’s an historic place – castle, ancient churches, holy well, et cetera. Behind the Cathedral we’ve turned up graveyard on top of graveyard. It would be wonderful to have a huge, definitive excavation, but that’s not going to happen any sooner than digging up your village to see if it was built inside a neolithic henge.’

‘Can I see them?’

‘No! We’ve put them into store. In our… municipal ossuary.’ Probably meaning some old shed. ‘Jane, this is
routine.
It’s not… not the start of something. I’m sorry.’

If it was routine, what was
he
doing here, the head guy, when it was all over bar the chainsaw massacre?

‘So no jobs here then,’ Jane said. ‘No making tea for archaeologists, emptying barrows, sieving soil. Listening to them moaning about all the false starts, lack of money, backbiting, constant competition for work…’

‘Are you
sure
this is what you want to do?’

‘I
want
…’ Jane’s fists were tightening in frustration. ‘… to have seen enough sides of the job to make a firm decision about whether that’s how I want to spend my working life till I’m too stricken with arthritis to pick up a bloody trowel.’